One of the songs on Portastatic’s new disc Be Still Please has lead singer/indie label head cheese/high ranking indie rock icon Mac McCaughan feeling robbed of his optimistic right of turning lemons into lemonade. He’s acknowledged the ice on the wings of his country’s leaders for years now (to borrow and repackage one of his lines from Superchunk’s brilliant 2001 album Here’s To Shutting Up), but now he’s begun hoping for weather disasters to wipe them out of existence for good. He’s coy in the title of “You Blanks.” Spoiler alert: The blank stands for fucker and it’s his preferred way of addressing the current administration. He sings, “All my songs used to end the same way/Everything’s gonna be okay/You fuckers make that impossible to say.” Earlier in the album, McCaughan sounds sarcastic in “Getting Saved,” “I’m not looking for peace/That’s so unnatural.” So can you blame him for savoring the rare stampede of donkeys two weeks ago as they prepared to get comfortable on all the governmental furniture? He loved what he saw and maybe once again he’ll be able to decorate the outros of his songs with silver linings and not calling people fuckers and a-holes—even if they deserve all of the scalding nicknames. McCaughan’s proven that he can wear sweaters, button-downs and cutting remarks well. He’s a history of it and it’s nice to know that once the jetlag wears off, he’ll be in great spirits. And when Mac’s in good spirits, he goes out, finds bands like the Arcade Fire and Oakley Hall to sign and release records of. He’s great when he gets that way so let the donkeys drink!—Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Amanda Walker
Mac’s 5 favorite things from the last week (in descending order):

5. Portastatic show at Sound Fix Records in Brooklyn—great record store, great feeling in the parlor in back where the bands play. We did the show as a duo (myself and Margaret White), we had a 7-year-old playing percussion, old friends in the audience and it was a lotof fun.

4. Assassin’s Gate by George Packer—a depressing, enraging, compelling history of the Iraq debacle to date, told (in measured tones—Packer was originally pro-invasion) both through reporting of the policy and planning blunders and through the personal histories of Iraqis living through the conflict and anecdotes of life there on the ground. A satisfying if not particularly hopeful antidote to the dribs and drabs of daily horrors available from the daily news sources…

3. Sound Grammar by Ornette Coleman—i’m loving this new Ornette record, a quartet with Denardo on drums, two bass players and Ornette doing his thing on sax, violin and trumpet and sounding really freaking fresh out of the gates…makes me feel good when I hear a mind this reliably creative still operating at this level!

2. Tanned Tin Festival, Castellon, Spain—three days (and when I say “days” I do mean the period between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.) of music in a beautiful old theater full of enthusiastic Spanish fans. Portastaticplayed around 3 a.m. Sunday morning (and this was the night that was running “on schedule”!), but somehow we and most of the audience were still awake…saw great sets by M.Ward, David Grubbs, Magik Markers (who totally killed it), Okkervill River and many others. Had some cervezas and seafood down by the port, returned last night exhausted after 20 hours travelling, but Spain knows how to do rock and roll right.

1. The Mid-term Elections of 2006 in the USA—well I’ve been out of the country since the day after the elections and have missed how the GOP fascists are spinning their losses but I was up late on election night to watch jackasses like Santorum, Allen, and Conrad Burns go down, not to mention the legion of slightly less offensive scumbags who also lost. To quote my mechanic after charging me an exorbitant sum to fix the radiator in my old Toyota, “Oh What a Feeling!” Rumsfeld’s immediate sacking let’s you know just how POLITICAL the Iraq policy has been, as opposed to reality-based (“We lost our ass in the election, time to change strategy”). Still waiting for Rove to show us “the math.” Yeah, we still have two years left of WPE but for now anyway, “So long creeps!”

Portastatic
Merge Records